DRM serves as piracy incentive, study finds

Rice and Duke University modellers have discovered that rather than disrupting piracy, DRM
actually acts as an incentive for people to pirate music instead of
buying it.

The team used analytical modelling to look at the effect of
digital rights management on music piracy, and published their
results in a paper titled "Music Downloads and the Flip Side of
Digital Rights Management Protection".

The report reads: "Only the legal users pay the price and suffer
from the restrictions. Illegal users are not affected because the
pirated product does not have DRM restrictions."

Dinah Vernik, assistant professor of marketing at Rice's Jones
Graduate School of Business, told TorrentFreak: "In many cases, DRM restrictions prevent
legal users from doing something as normal as making backup copies
of their music. Because of these inconveniences, some consumers
choose to pirate."

Vernik added: "Removal of these restrictions makes the product more convenient
to use and intensifies competition with the traditional format
(CDs), which has no DRM restrictions. This increased competition
results in decreased prices for both downloadable and CD music and
makes it more likely that consumers will move from stealing music
to buying legal downloads."

The music industry moved on from DRM some time ago, and even the
record labels' piracy-hating trade body, the IFPI, said two years ago that removing DRM would "significantly boost
download sales".

However, DRM is still widely found in most other forms of online
content -- particularly games,
movies and e-books. Perhaps there's something to learn here for them.

Edited by Olivia Solon

Comments

It took some researchers to work this out. I told the industry this about 8 years ago. Pat yourselves on the back researchers and take a day off from being pricks